This post originally ran as an item in the Politics Report. Voice of San Diego members can receive the Politics Report every Saturday in their inbox.
Last week, the chair of the Board of Supervisors, Nora Vargas, made it official that she and all four of her colleagues had, as we reported last week, offered the job of chief administrative officer overseeing 18,000 county employees to Ebony Shelton, the current chief financial officer. She will be the first Black woman to lead the county and her financial expertise will come in handy immediately as the county braces for state budget cuts.
The Board will make it official Tuesday.
In the Union-Tribune story about the appointment, Vargas subtly sent a dig at her critics pointing out that all the supervisors had supported the process they went through and then there was this sentence:
“Finalists were also interviewed by a panel of 10 community members — two from each supervisorial district — who provided feedback to the board on the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate,” the paper wrote.
That’s not true: Yes, each of the five supervisors appointed two community members to interview the finalists. Yes, they met Monday May 27 via Zoom to do that. However, I have confirmed via several of them that they did not find out until that meeting that they would only be interviewing one candidate. The search firm and the supervisors had decided to only send them two candidates: Shelton and another from outside San Diego.
But the one from outside the county dropped out. They interviewed Shelton but there was no official feedback provided to the Board of Supervisors about her from the panel.